"This mysterious book is still avowedly not understood, and we assist, now-a-days, at a most curious spectacle. There are not a few Chinese of education among those who have picked up some knowledge in Europe or in translations of European works of our modern sciences, who believe openly that all these may be found in their _Yih_. Electricity, steam power, astronomical laws, sphericity of the earth, &c., are all, according to their views, to be found in the _Yih King_; they firmly believe that these discoveries were not ignored by their sages, who have embodied them in their mysterious classics, of which they will be able to unveil the secrets when they themselves apply to its study a thorough knowledge of the modern sciences. It is unnecessary for any European mind to insist upon the childishness of such an opinion. Even in admitting, what seems probable, that the early leaders of the Bak people (Poh Sing) were not without some astronomical and mathematical principles, which have been long since forgotten, there is no possible comparison between their rude notions and our sciences. "It is not a mysterious book of fate and prognostics. It contains a valuable collection of documents of old antiquity, in which is embodied much information on the ethnography, customs, language, and writing of early China. "Proofs of various kinds--similitude of institutions, traditions and knowledge, affinities of words of culture; and, in what concerns the writing, likenesses of shapes of characters, hieroglyphic and arbitrary, with the same sounds (sometimes polyphons) and meanings attached to them, the same morphology of written words, the same phonetic laws of orthography--had led me, several years ago, to no other conclusion than that (as the reverse is proved impossible by numerous reasons), at an early period of their history, and before their emigration to the far East, the Chinese Bak families had borrowed the pre-cuneiform writing and elements of their knowledge and institutions from a region connected with the old focus of culture of south-western Asia. "Numerous affinities of traditions, institutions, and customs, connect the borrowing of script and culture by the Chinese Bak families with the region of Elam, the confederation of states of which Susa was the chief town, and the Kussi the principal population. "What are the historical facts of this connection we do not know. Has the break-up which happened in those states and resulted in the conquest of Babylonia by the Elamite king, Kudur Nakhunta, at the date, which is certain, of 2285 B.C., been also the cause of an eastern conquest and a settlement in Bactria? and would this account for the old focus of culture coeval with the earlier period of Assyrian monarchy said to have existed in Central Asia?